 | |  |
Notes
Blanck prefaces his descriptions by noting, "The sequence has not been established and the order in which they are here presented is wholly arbitrary."
The possibility of an early extract should be mentioned. As item 5042 Blanck (II, 520) notices an entry in the "Appendix of Titles Considered but Rejected" of Chester Noyes Greenough's A Bibliography of the Theophrastan Character in English, ed. J. Milton French (1947), p. 276: "The Smooth Divine, 1788" — presumably the passage beginning "There smil'd the smooth Divine, unus'd to wound / The sinner's heart, with hell's alarming sound" (533-564). Blanck suggests that this extract, unseen by Greenough or French, may have been published in a periodical. (More recently, the "smooth Divine" passage has been printed in Norman Foerster's American Poetry and Prose, 3rd ed. [1947], p. 248, and Jay B. Hubbell's American Life in Literature, revised ed. [1949], I, 183.)
THE | TRIUMPH | OF | INFIDELITY: | A | POEM. | [flat-diamond rule] | SUPPOSED TO BE WRITTEN BY TIMOTHY DWIGHT, D.D. | OF GREENFIELD IN CONNECTICUT, IN 1788. | [flat-diamond rule] | LONDON: | PRINTED FOR J. MATHEWS, No. 18, STRAND. | MDCCXCI. A copy of this 28-page reprint is in the Yale Library.
In parenthetical illustrations, when variants are compared, the reading of A is given before that of B. The designation "n." refers to Dwight's prose note to the line in question.
The incorrectness of "mens" is questionable, but "men's" seems to have been in general use for half a century before the Triumph was written. For example, eighteenth-century editions of Pope at the University of Illinois (representing all decades but the first) regularly print "Weighs the Men's wits" (The Rape of the Lock, V.72) from 1736 on. The B text is otherwise (with one exception) scrupulously correct in its possessive forms; it contains four special instances of possessive plurals ending in s without apostrophes ("others" 531 and 701, "wives" 556, "lords" 612), but, again using Pope as the example ("heroes'," "beaus'," "lovers'," in The Rape, V.115, 116, 118), the s-apostrophe form seems to have appeared generally only in the last quarter of the century.
In, respectively, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," SB, III (1950-51), 19-36, and "Current Theories of Copy-Text, with an Illustration from Dryden," MP, XLVIII (1950), 12-20.
Chauncy died in 1787. The most important of his late works, which Dwight saw as the ultimate form of Old Divinity Arminianism, were Salvation for All Men Illustrated and Vindicated as a Scripture Doctrine (1782) and The Mystery Hid from Ages . . . or the Salvation of All Men (1784).
The typographical peculiarities, as well as the phrase, may have been suggested by Pope's "The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated," line 121, which in many editions is printed "To Virtue only and her friends, a friend." But I think the reason given above for the change from A to B in line 776 is valid quite apart from considerations of "source."
| | |